Drag is a celebration. Drag is an attitude. Characterizing drag queens as "bitchy, catty, dumb, slutty" is reductive and insulting. The female persona created by a drag queen is robust, powerful, enduring. She has moxie, smarts, humor and beauty.

Danny was never able to forget what it meant to be a homeless teen. He overcame homelessness and built a good life for himself, but he bore the scars in his psyche, and in his body. He contracted hepatitis while he was homeless; it shortened his life.

Gays have often compared our fight for equality and acceptance to the struggle of the Black community. While not everyone in the Black community is thrilled about that, the parallels are too strong to deny.

Ultimately the Stonewall Riots help free the gay community from the stigma of being born gay and remaining alive to their true nature, but it helped to free the straight world from the bondage of fear and bigotry regarding the variegated sexuality of humanity; a fear that held it in its grip.

The dancing and partying was on at the Stonewall Inn when the raid and ensuing riots occurred the early morning of June 28, 1969, yet it was 38 years later in 2007 when I realized the historic significance of the uprising.

For anyone under 30, it may be difficult to imagine a time when the gay-rights movement wasn't operating at a milestone-a-minute pace. Fortunately a wave of artistic and media projects has emerged to remind us of heroes past, to refocus us on the type of activism that helped elevate the LGBT movement and to inspire us to make that final push.

When a young person can go to school confident and proud of who they are, without the stigma they may face from their peers or from within their own ideals of who they should be, then we can say, 'this is the year it all ends.'

Sometimes the engagement achieved while knocking on doors as a candidate for office turns out to be of great personal significance, one that ties together loose ends from one's life, and the life discovered overlaps so much with one's own that it is uncanny. This is one such story.

My discomfort and concern when watching the Rose Parade marriage ceremony stems from my understanding of the Stonewall rebellion as an impetus for revolutionary change within an overridingly oppressive social structure, as opposed to mere reform, accommodation, or assimilation.

As we approached that intersection, we could hear shouting, multiple sirens, the distant but distinct sound of violently breaking glass. We were greeted by the thrilling but unnerving sight of a Volkswagen Beetle upside down -- yes, on its roof! -- in the middle of Christopher St.

They say if you stay in the same place long enough, you get to see everything. So by staying on the same block in Greenwich Village longer than I ever expected, I've seen history being made in front of the Stonewall Inn, not once but twice.

As a gay man and tax-paying American citizen whose right to equal protection under the law has been denied me my entire life, today I feel guardedly hopeful. Guardedly, as I am fully aware of how many people share equally strong negative feelings about the court's recent rulings.

Pride parades, or "gay liberation protests," as they were first called, have been critical to bringing about LGBT rights all over the world. But we've abandoned their initial purpose as a call for equality. We owe it to ourselves, and to our history, to call upon our rich activist traditions.

We may mark time as before and after the Stonewall riots, before and after Rosa Parks sat where she pleased, before and after Jackie Robinson stepped onto Ebbets Field, but those moments were made possible by many, many, many named and unnamed people who came before.

As a 44-year-old man born in 1969, I can only imagine what it was like for those who were in New York City during the Stonewall riots that year. This is why it is wonderful to be able to talk to someone who witnessed it firsthand: Donald Reidlinger, who was a teen during the summer of '69.